Thursday, July 13, 2006

When the music is faster and violins repeat the same phrase and melancholia slips around my body pinning my arms to my side and my psyche to the ceiling of my skull. It clinging there like a frightened cat that thinks, "Oh, shit. Now look what I've done. Won't someone get me out of this thing I have gotten into...I'm slipping...nails slipping!" When the very cells of my body scream, "We know this feeling, have felt it, loathe it. Save us!" When the smell of coffee and pumpkin bread doesn't comfort, but instead taunts that I will never feel that feeling again. When the pen in my hand, pink ink, doesn't brighten the words I wrote --I wroteIwroteanyway.It's all I ever knew andwhat I ever do andI will never stopbecause just like that catI'm clinging and the words are my clawsand the page is my ceilingand sometimes I don't really knowhow I got there,but I know the words hold me there.And eventually, someone will come alongwith a telescoping ladderand rescue meor, more likely,I will take a deep, whiskered, meowing breathand just let go.So far --I always land on my feet.

Book Shelf

Can It Really Be Taught?: resisting lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy by Ritter and Vanderslice

thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs by Juliana Spahr

One Big Self: an Investigation by C D Wright

Scratch Sides by Kristin Prevallet

An Essay in Asterisks by Jena Osman

Shut Up Shut Down by Mark Nowak

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

Commons by Myung Mi Kim

Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand

Blue Front by Martha Collins

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Zong by M. NourbeSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng

The Midnight by Susan Howe

The Nonconformist's Memorial by Susan Howe

Selected Poems of Charles Olson

Paterson by William Carlos Williams

12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright

The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose by T S Eliot

ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You by Juliana Spahr

Bad History by Barrett Watten

The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Cantos of Ezra Pound

The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer by Mark Allen

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

Insel by Mina Loy

Wallace Stegner: Angle of Repose; Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier; Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West; Crossing to Safety